Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Tuesday, May 01, 2018

Bryn Oh Creates Real World Bronze Sculpture Based on Her Virtual World Art for Real World Art Festival

What you’re looking at above is two versions of the "long legged Maskitt", a creation of the Canadian metaverse-based artist known as Bryn Oh -- the left, standing 30 feet high, from one of her 3D installations in Second Life; the right, standing six inches tall, a bronze sculpture made from her actual hands. The latter is going to be featured at the Santorini Biennial in Greece, in November this year.

“I was approached by an organizer of the virtual portion [of the art festival] who has an avatar named Art Blue,” Bryn tells me. “The curator follows my work and collects both paintings and sculpture. He actually visited me here in Canada from Germany a few years ago to purchase some oil paintings. Due to this connection they approached me to have the bronze sculptures created as awards.”

Here’s how she converted the sculpture from digital 3D to actual 3D, through a rather clever process using clay and a 3D modeling program:

‘The clay is the base from where you make a mould. The mould has a hard outer shell and a polyurethane rubber or silicone center. Once the mould is finished, you pour wax into the mould creating a replica. This is called the lost wax process. Rather than build with clay, I now will build in Zbrush -- a 3D program which, when used with a pressure sensitive pen tablet, is a bit like working with clay.... After building the model in Zbrush I can then have a 3D print created, and that print now becomes the original from which the lost wax process is taken.”

The Maskitt is part of Bryn’s interlocking narrative, which she’s been telling for over 10 years through her virtual world installations, a story of nature and technology wildly out of sync:

“One element in the world I created is the idea that humanity would genetically engineer creatures in an attempt to solve various problems from pollution, to stabilizing the food pyramid, to simple entertainment. In the 'Singularity of Kumiko' [above], I talked about rabbits dying off after having been tinkered with, their genes are manipulated so that after their mating prime they suddenly grow fat and have one hind leg become crippled so they become easy prey for foxes who themselves were mysteriously dying off…

“Essentially, the idea is that at our stage in development, we seem to be able to do amazing technological and genetic things but in some ways, we release these technologies faster than we think about them... The Long-Legged Maskitt is a genetically manipulated creature which stands a few stories tall and walks the polluted environments of that world filtering the air through its gas mask. They walk industrial cities and clean up sites slowly purifying them. They are a mixture of greyhound dog with a giraffe."